StaffCallAug162012Notes

• BHL Staff meeting updates
  Meeting to be held Sept. 27-28 in Cambridge, MA at MCZ. We are encouraged to arrive on the 26th. We're trying to wrap up the meeting by 4pm on Friday. Martin sent out emails with further logistics. Check with your institutional directors to see about meeting attendance. The room is limited to about 30 people. Any questions, send Bianca an email.
  • What kinds of things do we want to discuss at meeting?
    • Suzanne: Not sure I'll be one of the people attending, but I think we should discuss all the different projects we're starting to incorporate into BHL, like Field Notebooks, connecting content status, seed and nursery catalogs projects, etc. I'm not sure if Martin needs to come up with this list, since he might be the only person who knows all of them, or if we want to make a list of things we've heard of.
    • Bianca: Anyone on call know of any other projects?
    • Trish: We could include Art of Life and Global Names projects.
    • Bianca: Just FYI, we are making an effort to advertise these new activities we're doing, mostly on the blog and with a new newsletters and quarterly reports. There is a working agenda page for the staff meeting, but this is now just a working dump of ideas. We're not sure how the time will be sliced between staff topics and tech topics. I want to make sure we get the most important things covered that we really need to discuss face-to-face and not just on calls. Grace and I have been discussing having a session on vision and mission activities and to nail down real goals to help us align all our various projects into a cohesive BHL project. We also hope to use these goals to determine whether our activities meet our actual project goals. Thoughts?
    • JJ: Agree. Revisiting mission should be an iterative process so we all know why we're doing what we're doing and who we're serving.
    • Suzanne: Agenda says branding, which should be teased out from missioning.
    • Gilbert: Mission should be separate from branding to see how we can use mission inform our branding discussions later on. We need to get the mission figured out first and then move on to branding.
    • Becky: It makes sense to do this mission work, because we keep getting targeting new audiences at various meetings, but then we just go back to our respective places and keep doing what we're doing. Regrouping on this to change our work would be good.
    • Bianca: We also discussed getting a handle on BHL priorities. A group worked together as result of Life and Lit to list priorities as articulated at that meeting. It would be good to revisit this to see where we are and what impact that document had if any. It could inform what we could do in the future.
    • Marty: Can we suggest full text searching and the status of that work be an agenda item? Where does that fit into priorities?
    • Gilbert: We need an update on all technical aspects being worked on lately.
    • Bianca: We're still trying to figure out if we're having separate staff and tech meetings or if they'll be together. I was told to try to have a concurrent track, but if there are separate sessions, we should have tech folks come to staff and tell us what they've discussed at the end of the meeting.
    • JJ: Are we thinking of doing a Flickr Tagging show and tell or an actual workshop?
    • Bianca: There has been discussion on trying to demonstrate at the meeting the tagging events we've been doing. If there is time, it would be nice to do a demonstration of the tagging party and have people tag some things at the meeting. At a minimum it would be good to talk about how successful this has been.
    • Suzanne: We could find out if Harvard wanted to do one that everyone could come to at the end of the meeting.
    • Bianca: It would be fun, but we'll have to see about time.
    • Suzanne: Do we need to talk about the GRIB?
    • Bianca: No. Our meeting will focus on BHL-US/UK issues. We don't have time to prioritize the GRIB.
    • We'll also be sure to provide a way for staff to attend the meeting virtually.
      WORKING MEETING AGENDA: BHL+Staff+and+Technical+Meeting
      
      
• BHL Quarterly Report Q4, FY12 BHL Quarterly Report.pdf
  • Bianca: We're looking for feedback on quarterly reports. They're intended for both public and internal audiences. They're linked on public and private wikis. What do you think of the reports so far?
    • Marty: Overall it's very well done. Is this report just focusing on the US/UK?. If so, it should be presented more as a BHL-US/UK report so it's clearer for the metrics. It should also include organizational contact information, whether it be the steering committee or other staff members. We should also document who's doing authoring and editing, etc on the reports.
      • Page 3 and throughout: Discourage titles in multiple colors. Hard to read. Plenty of other color in the document.
      • Page 4: Digitization statistics: Not sure I understand what items in production phrase means. Make this clear.
    • Bianca: We use the phrase in production to refer to items you can actually see on the BHL website. We do also have a beta site where there are more or less items. These reports shouldn't have that distinction, though.
    • Marty: In page 6 on website statistics - change phrasing in the first sentence.
      • Page 7: Thinking in terms of outside person, I'm not sure what bounce rate means. Needs footnote or explanation.
    • Keri: Bounce rate is a standard web metric.
    • Suzanne: Should we even include this metric? It's important to keep, but maybe not in quarterly reports. Also shouldn't have 0s in numbers on the website metrics pages; just list them as they are.
    • Marty: Visualization of data at bottom of 7 - map not terribly meaningful because it's so small. Map should be larger.
    • Grace: Should we increase the overall length of the report to expand website metrics section, or is it long enough as is?
    • Marty: Already too long. We shouldn't increase length.
    • JJ: We could consolidate social media into 2-page spread and give website more space.
    • Suzanne: Might also be long this time because there was so much activity. Maybe on case by case basis we should figure out how to not increase length and do more creative layouts. This is quarterly report to members and a PR piece. I like being able to quickly see the numbers without having to read.
    • Bianca: Do we need about language each time? Maybe it's made into briefer blurb?
    • Grace: Agreed. What additional metrics do people want to see?
    • Suzanne: I would like to know money things. How much raised to date, etc. Should it be presented quarterly or annually?
      • JJ: Maybe annually?
      • Keri: Maybe included only in first or fourth quarter.
    • JJ: Do partners want partner statistics in report?
      • Suzanne: No, especially because there's a comparison that ends up happening.
      • Bianca: The BHL Reporting Document lists metrics by institution.
    • Suzanne: We could do highlights within the reports, such as on a user. Maybe instead of quotes do user or institution highlights?
      • Consensus: Not need in these reports.
• BHL Newsletter http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs096/1103622715135/archive/1110568879425.html
  • What are your general thoughts on the newsletter?
    • Bianca: Do any of you disseminate the newsletter among people at your institutions?
      • Marty: Yes, through the library system.
    • Bianca: Newsletter intended to give people quick snapshot of BHL.
    • Marty: It seems that there's a diversity of ways we're promoting BHL. How do you decide what to put where, what to duplicate, etc. There are so many different avenues for getting information out.
    • Grace: Everything gets disseminated on our blog. We choose the top 3-4 highlights from the blog for the quarter for our newsletter and the top 7-8 for our quarterly report. But there is a lot of duplication, trying to get information about BHL out in as many ways as possible.
      • JJ: If you want one place to go, go straight to the blog.
      • Suzanne: And then the Quarterly report or newsletters are for disseminating information to higher-ups.
    • We should include links to the newsletter and reports on the BHL portal.
• BHL AUUSome UI - work is underway to plan for a visit by our BHL Australia colleagues to MOBOT to help Mike work on a new UI for the BHL website. See list of requirements developing here: BHL User Interface merge
  • The BHL UI will be changing. BHL-Australia colleagues are coming to visit folks at MOBOT to work on integrating BHL-US/UK and Australia sites into one. This wiki page talks about how we're going to merge sites together: BHL+User+Interface+merge. We'll be working in multiple phases to address issues as discovered as part of the usability tests. The work will include: Trying to get the two sites to align in terms of functionality; incorporating the updates to BHL-US/UK that have happened since the usability surveys; and brainstorming future developments for UIs.
    • Trish: The Au site will be going away due to funding and staffing changes. We always knew we wanted to bring the BHL-Au and BHL-US/UK sites together, so now is the time to do it. We needed a list of functionality we wanted to incorporate into the merge. That is outlined in the BHL User Interface Mergewiki page.
      • Top priorities are book viewer and advanced search (something Au doesn't have that needs to be incorporated into the merge).
      • The timeline is short. All functional items must be signed off on by Sept. 21.
      • If you have time to look at the list on the wiki page and think there's any functionality missing, let me know.
    • Marty: I understand that Au site will go away but there's still development going on on that site?
      • Trish: Simone and Simon are still working on Au project till end of Oct. If we want to do a merge, we must do it by the end of Oct. There will not be a BHL-Au site after Oct. All their content will be accessible only through BHL-US/UK site. All interface changes we're doing will happen by end of Oct. They're pulling in all functionality we have and they don't into their site, thus creating one cohesive site, then sending up that code to us so we can use it to replace our existing portal. There will be only 1 portal then.
    • Bianca: One new requirement is the need to provide links to newsletters and quarterly reports.
      • Grace: Perhaps we could have an outreach page linked from homepage that aggregates all our outreach activities.
    • Trish: The front page will look more like the Au site because users liked that better. We need to figure out how to maintain that look and feel while not losing needed functionality.
    • Bianca: Development work will happen through end of Oct. Do we know when actual switch would happen?
      • Trish: Ely is sending Simone and Simon for 2-3 weeks in Oct., and the hope is by the time they leave we'll be ready to turn on new UI. We won't have access to them past late Oct.
    • Bianca: We need to think how the switch will happen; how to present that this work is happening and how to prepare people.
      • Grace: We should create a guide to the new website.
      • Bianca: We should hold off on creating new user tutorials until new website is rolled out.
• Art of Life grant update (Trish)
  • We're about 3.5 months into the NEH project. Work includes:
    • Indianapolis Museum of Art working on algorithm to identify where images are in BHL
    • Working on schema that outlines the elements and fields needed to describe images so people can find them.
    • Trish: We'll be doing a blog post at the end of this week or early next with a link to the schema. We'd like feedback from users and staff.
• Reminder to populate BHL Presentations / Posters and Papers / Calendar with any relevant information.
• Round Robin (was not held due to time constraints) but the MBLWHOI Library would like to add to the notes our news that can't wait: Our Library Director Holly Miller has left MBLWHOI for the position of Director of Research Collections at Florida Institute of Technology; Our former Assistant Librarian and Archivist Diane Rielinger (and BHL staff member) and our former Associate Director and Data Library/WHOI Manager Lisa Raymond (a behind the scenes BHL staff member) now both hold the historic positions of Co-Director of the MBLWHOI Library. This turns a new page for all of the above librarians and for the MBLWHOI Library as it is the first time in 125 years that the MBLWHOI Library had a Co-Directorship. -Matt Person